Appomattox: The Last Campaign (review)

BOOKREVIEWS81 The Shaw family was inextricably woven into the fabric of Boston's first families, although young Robert's parents moved to Staten Island when he was nine. He had an irregular schooling, including several years abroad, and wound up at Harvard. Uncomfortable and ineffective in the classroom, Shaw voluntarily left Harvard during his junior year and entered an uncle's mercantile firm in New York City. He drilled as a private with the New York Seventh Regiment and, immediately after Sumter, left with his regiment for Washington. The following year he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Massachusetts Second and saw action at Winchester, at Cedar Mountain during Second Bull Run, and Antietam. Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, a friend of the Shaw family, was authorized, in late January, 1863, to raise a regiment of Negro soldiers. Almost immediately he offered its command to the 25-year-old Shaw, who first rejected, and then accepted, the commission. Shaw returned to Massachusetts, readied the regiment for active service, and took it by ship to Hilton Head, south of Charleston, S.C., where the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) would begin its distinguished career. Shaw led the first major assault against Fort Wagner, overlooking the Charleston harbor, and was killed in action. The assault failed but his Negro troops made their mark as soldiers. Mr. Burchard's concern is with narrative and color, not with historical questions. His descriptions of military parades and battle scenes, of Shaw's courtship and marriage, of landscapes and weather, are skillfully and tastefully done. His interpretation of Shaw as a man—quiet, courageous, charming, and uncertain—is finely drawn. The Shaw family's close ties with the bright lights of Boston's business, antislavery, and intellectual community is noted, but not probed in terms of their influence on the war and on Shaw himself. The difficulties of Shaw's command emerge without a full explanation of why they existed or how he tried to resolve them. Until the climactic battle, there is litde indication of personal contact between Shaw and his junior officers or between Shaw and his troops. Robert Gould Shaw became a symbol, in Mr. Burchard's words, "to those who had devoted their lives to the breaking of the back of the American shame"; it is good in these days of a continuing shame to have his story told again. Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. State Historical Society of Wisconsin Appomattox: The Last Campaign. By Burleigh Cushing Rodick. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1965. Pp. 220. $6.00.) In the long flow of a nation's history, key episodes attract the interest of every spectator, both the general reader and the scholar. The Civil War is, of course, such an episode, but within this dramatic four-year span there are events of particular fascination. The first shot at Fort Sumter, 82CIVIL WARHISTORY the clash between the Monitor and the Merrimac in Hampton Roads or the Alabama-Kearsarge duel off the French coast, the daring raids of Forrest, Grierson, Stuart, and other cavalrymen, the Trent affair, the Emancipation Proclamation, Pickett's doomed assault at Gettysburg, dozens of bloody battles and grueling campaigns—the list seems almost endless. Surely one of the most awesome events of all was the last act, the final disintegration of the Army of Northern Virginia. The death throes of a once-mighty military machine always present an epic spectacle, and even the triumphant men of the Army of the Potomac sensed elements of tragedy in the fate of their enemies. This Confederate force was something special in our history, an American army utterly destroyed in battle, a gallant but lost cause more famous than the Alamo, the Little Bighorn, or Bataan. This doomed legion's commander was another unique phenomenon in our past, the last—perhaps the only—real example of American chivalry. Lee's last campaign began at Five Forks on April 1, and ended eight days later on Palm Sunday in the litde village of Appomattox. Grant, the methodical commoner from the West, could hardly have been more magnanimous . Years of ruthless field campaigns lay behind him, and years more of inept, disillusioning politics awaited, but the mud-spattered...